I noticed at least two of you guys have tried running it on Win XP Professional. Why not try running it on another OS like: Win XP Home Edition or Vista just for kicks and see if that helps. I don't know if you can get access to those other Operating Systems, like a friends or another relative's, etc, but it's worth a try.

Anyway, I'm no expert, but I know the XP Professional versions have a whole lot more stuff/fluff to it than the Home Editions, which may be conflicting with the games files or something. In other words the game and your Pro version may not cooperate with each other because of certain files and whatever else between the two of them.